What Grunge's Favorite Shoe and Your New Lip Color Have in Common

Judging by collections coming down the runways at Alexander Wang, Victoria Beckham, and, this afternoon, 3.1 Phillip Lim, the MVP color of fall 2015 may be the absence of color: black. It’s for that very reason makeup artist Francelle Daly decided to add a shock of pigment to Lim’s models. “The clothes were kind of like modern punk,” she said, and they set her reminiscing about a favorite early nineties counterculture accessory. “I remembered my old oxblood Doc Martens—I wanted that to be the color of the lips.” With the iconic footwear in mind, she selected a semi-matte lipstick, NARS’s new VIP Red, for the girls’ mouths, applying it incautiously without a brush the way a rock star like Debbie Harry might (no coincidence, since Blondie was later played on the runway). Daly left the rest of the face bare, save for a light reflective blush (the soon-to-be-released Nico) and dabs of color-correcting concealer. “She’s not a girl who sits in the makeup mirror—she comes in, brushes up her brows, and puts on a lip. That’s it.” Sounds like just the kind of beauty strategy we’ll be channeling come September.